This week marked the completion of our building contract, which means we are officially out of Stage Five (the construction stage) of the first phase of our project. Early on we decided to split our project into different phases – with the farmhouse, our new house, the communal building, the heating systems for the one bed and three bed and all the external works in Phase One. The interiors and our Elizabethan cottage will come later. Although we haven’t quite finished all the building work, we’re close enough that we can complete the rest directly with our building contractor in the coming weeks. We had our last site meeting with our building contractor, site manager and architect this week too, where we confirmed what was left to do and ran through what Stage Six looked like. This stage is the ‘close out’ stage, where our architect updates all our final drawings and complies a list of snagging and defects to be finished. It’s exciting and equally slightly nerve-wracking to have finally got to the official end of building work!
Most of the work completed this week has been in/around the communal building (‘The New Barn’), which is the one building left with significant work to do. With help from two of the concrete contractors, our site manager built the gabions behind our new barn – wire crates that are filled with stone and protect the bank in the orchard from collapsing. He’s finished the top off really nicely with grass, so it blends into the orchard but you can still see the stones which make a nice feature.
We ended up locating the new barn a little further out than where the original barn had been to avoid the need to build an expensive retaining wall backing onto the orchard. Ironically by the time we paid for the extra stone required to face the entire wall, and the stairs, and the gabions, we think it’s cost us more than the retaining wall would have done. There’s a chance however we’d have lost the mulberry bush which is of historical significance in the mulberry world, and it wouldn’t have looked as good without the stairs. It’s also a great way of getting rid of the huge pile of stone we had left over that wasn’t suitable for the barn walls, and removes the risk of any water seeping through the retaining wall from the orchard – always a potential problem when you have a wall built against a large bank of soil.
We’ve had both the tiler and the electricians on site this week. The tiler has completed the laundry floors – we used a tile similar in design to the farmhouse floor tiles for continuity. He’s added a little skirting around the walls with leftover tiles and it looks so good!
The electricians have been hard at work putting in various items of kit required for the solar tiles (which still aren’t connected yet but we hope to get done in the next few weeks), and installing the broadband connection from our house to the games room. This is only temporary until we complete and open the three-bed cottage – we’ve built each cottage to be independent and the communal barn is connected to the three-bed cottage in relation to utilities. But we don’t want to pay for two broadband connections right now so we’ll run the communal building off our connection until then. Our electricians have also been busy with lighting – installing the wall lights, outside lights and putting the beam light fittings on, which is the same design as the one in our new house.
We’ve continued painting in the games room too, doing the first coat of light blue paint on the back wall and against the bat loft to start with, followed by the second coat of edging of both blues. We also sanded back the window and bifold door sills and painted the first coat, and cleaned the bottom of the light beam. We hadn’t planned for this room to be a priority job but various fittings are going in next week and it needs to be ready by then. It also hopefully means we can finish with the platform soon so the flooring can go down.
One of the remaining jobs for our builder is to concrete the rest of the yard, around the side of the communal barn. It’s the area next to where the pallets and leftover roof tiles were being stored (and the huge pile of stones but that’s mostly gone now thanks to the gabions). While that section of concrete isn’t being removed, our site manager needs to cut it back to a clean edge so he can join the new concrete to the old. So John spent most of Sunday tidying up in the lean-to of the Elizabethan cottage – which hadn’t been touched since we moved in other than storing copious amounts of cardboard in there for the compost bins and was full of old bits of wood and probably 50 years of dirt and dust. He then moved all the pallets and roof tiles up to the lean-to to keep them out of the way until we use them.
We’re still aiming to have the farmhouse ready to rent out by late July, and over the last two weeks have had a few holiday cottage companies out to visit and give us their view of our rental potential. It feels like we have a lot to do when we show people around, so it’s a bit stressful when another week ends and we still have a long list of jobs to get through. The first step is to decide which company to go with and what the most important elements of their proposition are for us, so we have some homework to do this week. Then once we’ve chosen and we’re happy the place is ready, they’ll come back to take some photos and we can get the farmhouse live on their booking site!! I’m expecting the next few weeks to feel like a mad rush…
A very busy week at work meant little time for me to catch up on planting. John managed to mow all the lawns which has made the place look a lot tidier, and we had some very understanding friends visit this weekend who didn’t mind sitting outside to chat while I planted up the pile of pots we’ve accumulated. It’s incredibly late to get most of the flowers out and they look to have suffered while they’ve been waiting in the greenhouse, but hopefully some of them will flower in the coming weeks so the place looks brighter for visitors. One thing which is growing is the grass seed in our new back garden and in the three-bed garden, which is starting to create a green carpet amongst the soil. It’s a very promising sign.
Ley Farm Cottages 